I felt it was kind of a toss up for this between the science forum or the religion forum and ended up going with this one. I chose this forum because I am mostly concerned with what other thinkers feel the impact of this discovery will have on the ongoing struggle for meaning between the sciences and religion.

I am going to post a link to a short article from the New York times. I am sure there is more information on this by now but I just wanted to get the discussion going.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/05/scien ... wanted=all


Its my sincere hope that we don't see a bunch of national governments throwing tuns of cash into developing bigger colliders in order to try and rush some useful extraction of a particle to the market place. It is an interesting discovery and could lead to amazing things but i think the world has lots of other issues it needs to be focusing its energy and effort on right now.

My intuition is telling me that this particle is related to the concept of dark matter in some way. I imagine this particle as a membrane that extracts dark matter as its forced into this universe and extracts regular matter as it is forced into the dark matter universe. Almost like the interplay between oxygen and carbon dioxide on our planet but on an intergalactic scale.

Xris, I think we get it. This is all just conjecture. We are speaking of potential possibilities. I appreciate your steadfast diligence to try keep us grounded in the physical realm but I don't believe in anything unless it can punch me in the face. I am just tossing around some ideas.

There may not have been a big bang as there may not be a god. There are both negative and positive possible outcomes of both religion and scientism. This is primarily the discussion I wanted to attempt to engage in in this thread. What can we expect as far as momentum or inertia of public policy or private funding with this new information? What will be an acceptable level of investment from public coffers if any? Should these studies now be held up to greater scrutiny by governing bodies due to the potential Pandora's box affect?

LOL, Xris You obviously have not been to the the philosophy section at Books a Million lately. 1 small section about 1/16th the size of the Christian living section and half of the books are like ;Philosophy of Spiderman, Philosophy of Batman, Star Trek, Lord of the Rings ect ect.

You can write an epic tale about the spaghetti monster and his struggle to transcend the evil meatball monster that has kept is subjugated for and oppressed. The tale will record the likely create a school of thought based on hybrid of stoicism and individualism where in each individual had no choice but to pursue its own liberty.

So I am certainly feeling what your saying xris , we do have a tendency to become energized to an ecstatic level when we see an opportunity to impose our will on reality. This is when s*%t usually gets out of control.


It looks like the special on PBS tonight on Higgs Bosan is trying to co-opt Plato's Theory of Forms into there theories by saying particles are a reflection of a hologram.